


An Anywhere Road

by nevernevergirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-10 15:58:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1161708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevernevergirl/pseuds/nevernevergirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After finally leaving Neverland, Baelfire starts his life as Neal Cassidy in the foster system. Once again, he’s left feeling alone and neglected—except for fellow foster child, Emma Swan, with whom he immediately connects. They’re separated by the foster system and by circumstance over and over again, but they always seem to find each other—at school, in the streets, and finally, in a stolen yellow bug.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Like Dean Moriarty

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came from an idea my best friend [Sarah](http://zorabet.tumblr.com) and I had and plotted out together months ago--[this edit](http://cassadydearie.tumblr.com/post/69934623308/swanfire-au-after-finally-leaving-neverland) came from it, and now it's finally being written!

Bae started fearing magic on his 14th birthday, the moment his father looked at him with dangerous-sharp eyes, fresh blood spilled in vengeance lining the creases of the scaly hands reaching out.

_Do you feel safe, son?_ the monster in his papa’s body had asked. A cold, hollow pit had formed in Bae’s stomach when he realized no, he did not-- but it had sunk, hard and heavy and painful, when he realized it didn’t make a difference. Papa was gone, and this monster didn’t care.

Bae started truly hating magic the moment his feet left Wendy Darling’s window sill, his wrist in the impossibly firm grip of a shadow. Magic was relentless. It had promised him a new world with a fresh start, then held the dredges of his papa in the shell of a monster. It had delivered him to this new family, with their generosity and warmth and kindness, teased it with him for a mere few weeks before threatening to rip it at the seams. Magic was evil.

It’s not ‘til he reaches the last world that he stops believing in it all together. Magic is nothing special. It’s fearsome, it’s cruel, it has one hell of a grudge against him-- but that’s not so different from anything else, he thinks. Magic’s just the same as a cold rain on a dirty street in a land without it. Magic is no god, is no devil. It’s just miserable, and Bae is just tired.

He’d been trying to get back to Wendy’s land for ages, now. It had taken him a couple worlds to figure out how travel between lands actually worked-- he’d met a portal jumper in one strange land who used nothing but a magic hat, and he’d told him the trick was to know where you were going. He’s not sure if there’s more than one Land Without Magic, but he decides, in the end, that it doesn’t matter. ‘Without magic’ is the important part.

He’s not sure if he ended up where he meant to-- there’s no magic, as far as he can tell, but things aren’t the same. People here talk differently, the buildings are taller and new, their carriages are shaped weirdly and not pulled by horses. The best he can tell, he’s in a place called Oregon in the year 1992. It was 1906 when he was in Wendy’s land, so he decides maybe he’s in a different part, in a different time.

(It’s okay. He never really thought he’d find Wendy again. It’s okay. He stops thinking about Wendy.)

He stays on the streets and tries to go unnoticed. There are other children-- his age and older, mostly, though there are little ones here and there, which makes his heart ache even though he’s worlds past expecting life to be kind. They hide in forgotten corners-- alleyways behind dumpsters, loitering in shops and libraries and bus stations until they’re noticed and shooed away with a threat to call the cops.

That’s different, too-- last time he was in a land without magic, he could have been brought to the factories if he’d been found alone and parentless. There don’t seem to be factories here, at least not ones that children work in. He asks an older boy, once, as he runs away with the other children found out behind a grocery store, what would happen if the cops were called. The older boy had looked at him meanly, with a cruel grin that reminded Bae of Felix, making him ball his hands up into fists at his side.

“You’d go back into the system, dummy,” he’d snarled, before running off. Bae didn’t know what the system was. Bae didn’t know what anything here was. Best to stay out of everyone’s way.

There are adults, too, on the street. They frighten him--they remind him of the old beggar in the woods Papa helped-- the old beggar who turned out not to be a beggar at all, but the Dark One coming to tempt their fate.

There’s one old man, though--he and Bae share a covered alleyway when it’s raining. He’s okay. He mostly leaves Bae alone, and silently offers his spare blanket. Once, when the bigger boys came by to the loot the dumpster, he shooed them away, and Bae was grateful for that.

Sometimes, they talk, when the rain’s coming down too hard and the wind chills too cold. The old man chatters on, too-loud, and lets Bae ask whatever questions he wants, and Bae can almost ignore the rest of it. He used to be a professor-- a sort of teacher, Bae figures-- before he lost his money and his family and his home, and he’s still got this stack of books stashed inside of old suitcases. Bae thinks it’s wonderful. He can’t read very well--Morraine’s mama was teaching him, but they hadn’t gotten very far before the ogre wars, and once the wars stopped, Papa had scarcely let him leave the house. But he likes stories, at any rate.

These stories aren’t at all like the ones back home-- the cautionary tales of magic and its price, or the ones the lost boys would tell late at night of adventure and daring, or even the pirate’s dirty sea stories that made the tips of Bae’s ears blush. The old man’s stories are by people he calls “The Beats.” The old man loves the Beats, says he’d met some of them, says that Allen Ginsberg once told him to fuck off, even. Bae’s not sure what any of that means, but he likes the stories. Some of them are dirty, and some of them dark, but mostly Bae thinks they’re just...telling the truth.

The old man lends him one, but he must be able to tell that Bae’s having a hard time with some of the words, because he takes it back and flips through the pages, explaining. It’s called On the Road, he says, and it’s real. That worries Bae a little, because Peter Pan’s a story here too, but he’s not sure that’s the sort of thing the old man means. He says the characters were based off people--Sal Paradise was the author himself, and Dean Moriarity was a man called Neal Cassady.

He likes the story. He asks to borrow the book again, and he flips through it every night before it gets too dark. He’s not sure if he’s reading it, or if he’s just got it memorized, but either way, the story feels like it’s his. He can’t say that about much.

One night, when he’s in his alley corner, flipping through his book, the old man asks: “Don’t you have somewhere to be, boy?” Not meanly, though. Like he genuinely wonders why Bae’s not anywhere else.

“No,” Bae says, shrugging. “Not really.”

The old man grins, dirty and toothless.

“That’s lucky, that is,” he nods. “Means you can go anywhere you want. Like Dean Moriarity. Like Neal Cassady.”

Bae looks down at that, shaking his head. “I couldn’t,” he mumbled. “I wouldn’t know where to go.”

“You got here, didn’t you?”

“I guess,” he sighed. “But I was running,” he bit his lip, sending a silent praying that he wouldn’t ask why or from what.

“So keep running ‘til you find where you want to end up,” he shrugged. “Second chances, boy. That what the road’s about.”

He gets caught, a couple of days later. He’d managed to lift a bag of Doritos and one of the older boys, the one with the mean smile like Felix, had jumped him for it and a police officer had noticed. Not-Felix ran, but he’d knocked Bae down to the ground and twisted his ankle first. Caught.

He tells them his parents are dead, when they ask where they are, and it’s not a lie. The Dark One killed them both. They bring him to the police station, introduce him to a woman who calls herself a social worker, and he tells her the same thing. She asks who he’s living with now and he shrugs silently. She smiles sadly and pulls out a stack of forms.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

He opens his mouth, ready to say Bae, but he realizes-- that’s not true anymore. Bae is the name his papa called him. Bae had a father, and a mother once, and a home. Bae was brave and believed in magic and righteousness and he-- he doesn’t. Not anymore.

_That’s lucky,_ he remembers. _Like Dean Moriarity. Second Chances._

“Neal. Neal Cassady,” he says, for the first time. It feels..okay. Good. Like he means it.

The woman nods and writes it down. She gets Neal right, but spells Cassady wrong-- Cassidy with an i. Bae doesn’t notice it’s wrong ‘til years later, because it’s Dean in his book, but it’s alright. It makes it his.

“Am I going to go into the system?” he asks, quietly. The woman flashes him a small smile.

“Yes,” she said, softly. “We’ll take you to the boys’ group home here in Eugene tonight, but we’ll find you a foster family as soon as we can.”

A family.

Neal shrugs at that and thinks _good luck._

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma Swan hates this house, and she especially hates her new foster brother.

Emma hates this house. She _hates_ it.

She doesn’t really like any of them, she guesses. She liked the Swans, but then Mommy-- _Mrs. Swan_ had another baby, so she had to move. And now she always has to move, and she hates it, and she hates. this. house.

She’s only eight, but she’s not stupid. There are families that take kids like her for extra money, and there are families that take kids like her for _money_. Those are the ones with too many kids and not enough space and not enough of the cereal with the marshmallows to go around.

This is one of those. She’s the fifth kid, and they ran out of real beds the kid before her, so she shares a mattress with Josie on the floor in Katie’s room. She calls it a trundle bed when the social worker comes by, but Emma’s pretty sure it’s just sleeping on the floor and the social worker doesn’t even care anyway. It’s not so bad, because Katie’s 16 and has a boyfriend, so she sneaks out most nights and Josie takes her bed which is awesome because Josie kicks hard so Emma doesn’t mind the floor if there’s no kicking.

And she wouldn’t even mind that they don’t really cook much and that the mom forgets to go to the grocery store, like, a lot, because Josie taught her how to sneak extra brownies and chips from the school cafeteria.

And sometimes it’s not so bad that there are too many kids, because if there are too many kids, they don’t notice you, and if they don’t notice you, you can’t get in trouble.

But they’re mean. Everyone’s mean, even Josie who isn’t mean all the time but tattles on Emma for leaving a mess when it was her mess in the first place. The mom yells if Emma’s shoelace comes undone and the dad shouts after his beer at dinner and Derek looks at Katie in a way that makes Katie say fuck off which Emma’s pretty sure is a word she’s not supposed to say.

She wishes everyone would just be quiet and ignore each other. She thinks she’d be okay with the older kids taking all the cereal if they’d just be quiet.

One morning, Dan knocks over Josie’s orange juice and they start pushing and they all get snapped at about fighting which is so dumb because Emma wasn’t even doing anything, but then not-mom says they all better learn to get along or at least fake it because the social worker was gonna be by that afternoon with a new foster brother.

Emma’s so mad she kicks Joey Reynolds in the shins when he pulls her hair at recess and gets silent lunch for a week.

It’s even worse than she’d thought. New foster brother’s an older kid-- younger than Katie and Derek, but high school age, probably. Emma hates older kids, because they always think she’s a baby, and they always think they’re more mad than she is-- and that’s never true. Emma’s pretty sure no one’s more mad than she is. 

New kid’s name is Neal. Emma thinks his hair cut’s stupid, and she hates him. 

*** 

Neal is weird.

He does everyone’s chores and she doesn’t think anyone’s blackmailing him into it or anything, because she catches him washing the dishes when it’s her turn.

“Why do you always do that?” she asks, staring at him. He jumps and stares at her like she has two heads, and she realizes she’s never actually talked to him before. She stares back; he doesn’t get to make her feel weird, he’s the one being weird.

“Do what? The dishes?”

“Everyone else’s chores,” she shrugs, crossing her arms. “I was supposed to do the dishes.”

“Did you really want to?” He raises his eyebrows at her. She scowls.

“ _No_ ,” she rolls her eyes. “It’s just weird that you do.”

He shrugs and scrubs silently for a moment. Emma sighs, and is about to give up and go to her room because he’s weird, but then-- 

“They let me stay,” he shrugs. “My father used to tell me not to take kindness for granted. Everything comes with a price.”

Emma rolls her eyes at that.

“They’re not being nice, dummy,” she says, laughing a little-- he was pretty dumb for an older kid, she thought. “They’re getting paid for all of us, that’s why there’s so many of us.”

“I know that,” he mumbles, staring down at the dishes. “I’m just making sure.”

Emma frowns, watching him for a moment. She walks over decidedly, standing next to him and picking up a wash rag, looking at him expectantly. He raises his eyebrows, but hands her a plate anyway.

“Where’s your dad now?” Emma asks, curiously. It's probably rude. Emma figures she could still get away with rude, because she's only eight and people usually think she's too dumb to know any better. “How come you’re not living with him?”

“It’s a long story,” Neal sighed, shrugging. “How come you’re living here?”

“It’s a long story too,” she shot back.

It wasn’t, really. My real parents didn’t want me and the Swans didn’t want me either isn’t really a long story. But if Neal got to keep secrets, so did she. 

***

She doesn’t talk to Neal again until two days later.

She’s trying to read her book. She finished her math homework and Josie’s playing outside and Katie’s with her boyfriend, so she can almost pretend her room is her room, and she’s trying to read her book while she’s got a whole room to herself.

Except Neal’s just standing in the doorway, watching her like he wants to say something.

Emma looks up over her book glaring. “What?”

“Nothing,” he shrugs. “What are you reading?”

“I was reading my book, but now I’m not reading anything because you’re talking to me,” she rolled her eyes.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just...like books,” he shrugs, sighing and turning to walk away. Emma bit her lip.

“It’s called the Boxcar Children,” she sighs, and when he turns around and smiles just a little, Emma pretends she’s not smiling just a little back. “It’s a series, there are bunch of them.”

“What it’s about?” he asks, almost hesitantly. Emma bites her lip, scooting over to make room for him to sit next to her on the bed.

“There are these four brothers and sisters,” she says, quietly. “They don’t have parents, but they’re supposed to go live with this baker and his wife, only they don’t want the youngest one because he’s too little to do chores, so they all run away and live in a boxcar in the woods and have adventures together.”

Neal frowns. “That sounds like a sad story.”

“Not really,” Emma says, glaring a little. “They weren’t going to get to stay together, but now they can, and they have their boxcar, and they solve mysteries, and then their grandpa finds them and bring them to live with him and they get to keep the boxcar in the backyard, and they get a dog!”

Neal stares at her with his eyebrows raised, like he might laugh. She hates him.

“It’s my favorite story,” she grumbles, scooting away from him and curling in on herself a little. “So go away so I can read it.”

Neal nods and stands up, but he doesn’t leave.

“Wanna hear a secret?” he asks, quietly. Emma bites her lip, nodding slowly.

“Whatever,” she mumbles, shrugging so he knows she doesn’t really care.

He sits back down on the edge of the bed, pulling his own falling apart book out of his back pocket, holding it out for Emma to see. On the Road, the title says. Emma’s never heard of it. It looks like a grown up book.

“This is my favorite story,” he says, quietly. “It’s about these friends who travel across the country, and they can go where ever they want, explore whatever they want. It sounds kind of stupid when I try to explain it, I guess,” he mumbles. “But it’s my favorite.”

Emma bites her lip.

“You could read my books, if you want,” she offers, after a quiet moment. “My teacher gave me a couple of the ones in the series. You can’t borrow them,” she said, hastily. “Because they’re mine. But you can read them with me. If you want.”

He smiles just a little.

“Yeah, okay. I’d like that.”

***

The next morning, Neal’s already sitting at the table when Emma walks into the kitchen for breakfast, with two bowls of cereal in front of him. She sits next to him, frowning a little-- and then he slides a bowl in front of her--so. many. marshmallows.

She grins. He shrugs back. 

“You need a haircut,” Not Mom grumbles, pointing at the hair in Neal’s eyes. Neal looks down, nodding a little.

“I like his hair,” Emma says, firmly. Neal smiles a little.

She doesn’t hate him _that_ much.

 

 

 


End file.
